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Oct 12, 2024 | 
irishtimes.com | Shahnaz Habib
As Hurricane Milton battered Florida, I couldn’t help but sadly leaf through my favorite guidebook: Florida Keys: A History and Guide. I have never been to the Keys and I don’t have any plans to visit them. But this guidebook remains beloved to me. I do not intend to ever give it up to one of the many free libraries dotting my neighborhood, even though the information in it is rapidly turning obsolete, as happens with guidebooks. The book was written by Joy Williams.
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Sep 3, 2024 | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Shahnaz Habib |Sukhada Tatke |Bantirani Patro |Bashir Ali Abbas
Years ago, an acquaintance, a white American man, went to check into a hotel near Mumbai airport the night before his flight back to the US. The reception denied him room because he had overstayed his Indian e-visa by a few days, something he was aware of but did not think would be a big issue. “I thought it would be fine,” he later told his Indian partner, who flew back to New York as planned.
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Aug 8, 2024 | 
bookanista.com | Shahnaz Habib
The colorful history of the Western passport does not account entirely for passportism against Third World countries. For the crucial piece of subtext missing in this history, we have to read between the lines. In the nineteenth century, the British had made it a common practice to move around indentured labor between their colonies.
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Jul 29, 2024 | 
ft.com | Lilah Raptopoulos |Shahnaz Habib
This is an audio transcript of the Life and Art from FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘How to stop worrying about the ‘right’ way to travel’...
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Jun 11, 2024 | 
rfr.bz | Shahnaz Habib |Blythe Roberson |Jedidiah Jenkins
Perceptive Travel Book Reviews June 2024by Gillian KendallAirplane Mode: An irreverent history of TravelBy Shahnaz HabibIt's dizzying to critique a book about travel that critiques other books about travel, which are themselves critiques of the places they're about.
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May 27, 2024 | 
flipboard.com | Shahnaz Habib
Dear Abby: When I mentioned my fiance’s name, my great-aunt freaked outDEAR ABBY: My boyfriend of three years recently proposed. The issue is that his great-uncle jilted my great-aunt at the altar in the 1970s. My …
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May 27, 2024 | 
theprint.in | Shahnaz Habib
It was on a diplomatic mission for Tughlak that Battuta arrived in Kerala. On the Malabar coast, he survived a ship-wreck and a near-drowning. The adventures of Ibn Battuta in Kerala, but also pretty much everywhere on his travels, are a litany of troubles. He survives brigands, kidnappings, wars, shipwrecks, pirates, starvation, and disease. He stares death in the face so many times in his narrative that I lost count when I read it.
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May 3, 2024 | 
shethepeople.tv | Shahnaz Habib
For Shahnaz Habib, travel and travel writing have always been complicated pleasures. Tracing the power dynamics that underlie tourism, this insightful debut parses who gets to travel, and who gets to write about the experience. All the while, Habib threads the historic but ever-evolving dynamics of travel into her personal story as a child on family vacations in India, an adult curious about the world, and an immigrant for whom round trips are an annual fact of life.
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Mar 31, 2024 | 
scroll.in | Shahnaz Habib
With his American passport, Rollo did not need a visa; he could simply walk into France. With my Indian passport, not only did I need to apply for a visa, but I also had to interview in person at a French consulate and pay a visa application fee. It would be too vague to call this discrimination racism. The scholar Srđan Mladenov Jovanović writes about the importance of a separate term that differentiates citizenship-based discrimination from racism and xenophobia.
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Mar 31, 2024 | 
flipboard.com | Shahnaz Habib
Travel politics: Is ‘passportism’ being turned into a sly tool of racism and Islamophobia? An excerpt from ‘Airplane Mode: A Passive-Aggressive History of Travel’, by Shahnaz Habib. With his American passport, Rollo did not need a visa; he …
